No Stranger to You
by lotuskasumi
Summary: From a prompt on Tumblr: ""Get out of the way!" also 12/clara and if you dont like those then maybe "You look like you could use a hand." ? :))))" Angst and righteous, justified anger in regards to what Clara's had to endure, and the little regard paid to that trauma. Alternate ending to Deep Breath. (Whouffle/Twelve x Clara)


"Get out of the way!" A command born from fury and hurt bubbled out like acid from Clara's lips. Her eyes burned with tears she knew better than the shed — she'd hide them, she must. She would bury every tear, push them down so far inside it made her chest ache at the burial, as if her heart were being tucked away to rot long before its time.

It didn't hurt Clara to see the Doctor obey her without a word of protest. That he stepped aside and let her pass, nearly charging from the TARDIS doors back out into the air, to the world beyond his sight and current grasp, was nothing short of a miracle, yes, but it certainly didn't upset her. She'd expected an argument. She'd expected something of the protesting kind be it in words or act or an expression on the new, so-keen-to-frown face.

Instead she got his silence and compliance, and that didn't hurt Clara a bit. Not until she was back home, with the door to her flat shut and her back pressed against it, and then her head was bowing and her hair was falling forward, and the tears were crawling out from their grave inside her throat to choke her. But no one heard them. No one was there to care.

Just Clara.

—

Life carried on, and she would have to carry on with it. There was work to go to, and work to do _at _work, and so much to do in the little moments in between that Clara could not see how she could give herself time to grieve for what she'd endured since Christmas had dawned. She would smile, and smile, and play as nice as she could with what little grace she had, but inside she was fuming. Inside her heart was a graveyard of agonies, full to its grim brim little words she would have, could have, _should _have let slip before stomping past him. Words she would have, _must _tell him should he come around again — and he would, wouldn't he? He wouldn't stay away for long. Not for good. Not him.

It wasn't faith that made Clara think this. Not exactly. Faith was a _kind_ word for it. In a way, it was something like resignation: he would come back to her in the end, because that's what he did. On his own time, in his own way, he would come back to the aching corner of her life she'd carved out for him, some small bit of room he might call home.

She would wait for him to appear without letting her life stop for him. She'd never done it before. She wouldn't let it happen now. And if she was still sore by the time he came back to her — if she was still seething, still aching to spit out words so loaded with hurt and bile they might as well have been bullets full of the worst Judas-tier poison — then she would send him away until it passed. _"Come back tomorrow. Because tomorrow I actually might want to see your face."_

She would say this to him. She _would _say it, she must. Clara practiced saying this in mirrors as she got ready for work and in bed when the day was done, curling up on her side and clinging tight to the pillowcase, because it was something to hold on to and because she'd out grown the comforts of a stuffed animal guardian, standing sentinel between her and nightmares. But the nightmares came, as they must, as she expected. She wondered if the Doctor thought about what their recent trips had done to her, wondered if he even cared.

Visions full of fire and eyes tethered to wires, alive inside of a body full of rotten, aching, waxy skin that was forced over metal skeletons, a body and a life entirely distorted from the original shape greeted Clara in her sleep and haunted her days. Sometimes it didn't even look like the Mancini cyborg — it looked like the Doctor. This Doctor, the new one.

It took him three weeks to come back to her, and Clara still wasn't ready for him.

—

He took her by surprise one evening when she was shifting the weight of a few bags of groceries from one arm to the other, trying to fish her keys out from the pocket she'd tucked it in. The keys crashed to the floor with a shriek of metal, and she swore and shut her eyes, exasperated and so thoroughly _done _with today's troubles, only to open them and find the keys dangling there like bait waiting for her to lean forward and take a bite.

The Doctor held the keys out for another moment longer, looking down into her eyes and seeing the expression writ across her face. Very little change in his own.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.

"You looked like you could use a hand," he said, lowering the keys down to his side. Clara watched as he closed his fist around them, before he, too, noticed the familiarity. "I suppose we could switch? The bags for the key?"

His voice was as muted as the strangled air between them. _Resigned _seemed to be a better word that fit the way he looked just then, the way he would look at her, and especially the way he wouldn't. Downcast eyes, not to cause guilt but to display it, somber lines and scowls that once upon a time she might have wanted to smooth back and chase away with smiles.

Not this time. Not now. Not yet.

"Open the door, then." Waiting for him to do as asked, Clara shoved herself through the door and thought about kicking it shut, but reconsidered when she remembered the shoes she was wearing (large, dark, with thick heels that scuffed the classroom floors if she wasn't careful). She couldn't quite shut him out just yet, either. Let him make his own exit as he pleased: he'd given her leave to do that. Now it was time to return that favor.

The Doctor followed Clara into her kitchen, giving it a perfunctory glance. It was small and purely economical room, nearly crowded out by the table and two-chair set that felt more for appearances than actual use. Clara took her breakfasts in mobile form and sat in the living room for all other meals in between, poring over papers to grade and lesson plans to scheme.

Bold as brass, the Doctor took a seat, and watched as Clara set the grocery bags down on the counter-top and began to remove each item with deliberate care.

"What's wrong?"

Clara kept her back to him. At the very least, he'd noticed _that. _"Lots," she said, because it was true, and because it was all she felt safe to say.

The Doctor waited until the first bag was unpacked before he asked his next question. "Can I at least know one of them?" he asked, with all the careful manner of a man knowing he was treading on a wound.

"Can you _guess_?" she asked, shooting him a quick glance the way a dart is tossed at a target, aiming for dead center, but one of the fringe rings would suffice just fine.

"You're unhappy," he said, gazing at her with eyes so old and new, and a voice as weary as dust. "You're hurt."

"_Ding-dong_, brilliant," she all but snarled, tucking the milk into the fridge and snapping the door shut again. Her hand rested on the handle as those words sunk in, as the last _time _she'd heard those words sunk in — she'd been in this very kitchen, in a similar state of almost panic. _But I'm not scared now, _Clara told herself, because it was true and it bore repeating in all of the quiet, comforting space inside her head. _I'm not scared at all._

"Still a bit cross, then."

"More than a bit."

"Very cross. Supremely cross. The crossest."

"Absolutely." Clara nodded and looked down at the packet of crisps in her hand. A strange purchase, purely on a whim, because the bag had looked so bright and distracting, and she had enjoyed the way it shrank and shrieked in her hands. It felt nice to do that to something, instead of being the one it was done to. She turned to look at the Doctor, trying not to feel foolish with the crisps in hand and her temper stamped across every angle of her face. "Can you guess _why_?"

"Can you tell me?" he countered without any anger. Resignation again, but acceptance, too, as if whatever words she had to share was a lash he'd accept as penitence, as punishment, justly deserved and so sorely earned. "I'd rather not waste the time if you've got the answer ready."

Clara pulled out the chair across from his and sat down, tossing the bag onto the table and folding her hands neatly on the little cloth that her father had given to her as a house-warming gift. Lacy and decorated with blooming, twisting lilies, it was an elegant little thing that she felt like tearing to pieces inside her hands. Instead she stared at the Doctor, who sat with one hand on the table, lying flat, and the other pressed against the side of his face, cupping it as if to nurse a constant ache. They studied each other in silence, until she said.

"It's you. Both of you — the you before and the you now." These weren't the words that Clara practiced, but they were being said all the same, and once they had left that dark, bitter part in her heart she found it hard to try to cage them again. "You want to talk about games, Doctor? You want to talk about egomania and _neediness_? Let's start with the worst person in the room."

"I thought we weren't going to mention your egomania," he said.

"But _yours _was never forbidden," she pointed out. And he relented with a little nod. Clara tapped her fingers in flat little pats against the table and her hand, pulling her lips in tight to slid against her teeth. The Doctor watched these gestures, ticking his eyes up and down as if studying them hard enough to draw them later from memory.

"How often have you lied to me lately?" Clara asked, and before he could answer — she wasn't entirely sure she _wanted _him to — she carried on. "And why is it a thing that happens often at all? Why does it even happen more than once? People lie when they're scared or they don't think they'll get what they want from the truth, yes, fine, whatever, got that little bit of human nature sorted — but why is it _your _nature, Doctor? Why is dishonesty and cruelty suddenly no stranger to you? And what ever gave you the idea it was something I would let pass by unnoticed?"

"It wasn't…" he started to say and then, a first for him, he shook his head to stop those words and begin again with a new sentence. "I didn't set out to deceive you. It wasn't the intention, Clara. It was the result."

Clara had a word for that, but it wasn't polite and she didn't know if she wanted to waste the time to say it. She laughed instead, and figured that would suit in lieu of the curse. "I don't care what you _meant_ to happen, Doctor, because that's not how it worked out. You got that?"

"I do."

"Really?" she challenged, nostrils flaring and eyes blazing, and Clara leaned forward as if ready to leap across the table and pin him to the ground with every bitter, broken word. "Then tell me, Doctor: what did you _mean _to do when you left me behind at Mancini's? Something mad and brave and noble that I'm just not clever enough to see?"

"No," he said, a simple, single word that sounded both shaken and as hard as marble. "Don't cast aspersions on me, Clara."

"Don't make me have to!" she said, laughing out of the corner of her smirk. "Do you know how scared I was down there? Even _with _you there beside me? Do you know how sure I was that I was going to die, and never see my father or friends or students again? Do you know, Doctor?"

"I did. I do."

"Then _tell me_. Give me a reason. Give me something."

"So you can dismiss it?"

"So I can _know_ because I deserve to!"

"And what if I don't know, either?"

"Then I guess neither one of us will be happy." Clara searched his eyes, hating that there were tears in her own and nothing of the sort inside his. But his eyes had gone sad again, heavy and hollow, and his face seemed to show all the years of grief she knew for a fact shadowed his every coming day — if he let it. And he was letting it. She might have pitied him before, but she had no room in her heart to do that now. She could only think of her own heart's care and how best to see it through. "I won't make you promise not to do it again, Doctor. I'm not stupid enough to believe you and I don't think you'd lie again to me so soon. But I want you to promise me that you'll remember this moment. Remember me like this, right now, talking to you. Remember it the next time you think of turning your back and leaving me behind, because if I survive something like that, I'll never want to see you again."

The Doctor said nothing.

"Have you got that?" she pressed, her voice rising as the tears began to fall.

"I do," he said, and he did something Clara could not have ever guessed to see. Lowering down to his knees and drawing himself closer to Clara's side, the Doctor knelt down next to her and reached out both his arms so they rested in her lap. He folded his hands in a cradle of long, gnarled fingers woven into a web, the sort of grasp a praying man takes when he begs for absolute forgiveness. "I'm sorry, Clara. For what I did. For what I've done…" he trailed off, and Clara thought he knew what he wanted to say, but knew better than to let slip. The Doctor knew better than to say he would never do it again because a lie like that, even well-intended, could only go so far in that moment. "I'm sorry," he said again, and there was no misery in the word or in his tone, just a simple, true apology that she could no longer deny.

Clara unlocked one of her hands and gave the Doctor's bent head an awkward, somewhat affectionate pat. But that was the most she could bring herself to do until she noticed the shivering specks of tears on the backs of his hands. Then, and only then, did Clara reach out with her other hand and give his clasped set a comforting squeeze.

She wouldn't tell him it was all right. She wouldn't lie and say thank you, either. All she could say was a truth cut down the middle, leaving off the important end. "I forgive you, Doctor," she said. They both knew what went unsaid: _This time._

Silently, the pair of them prayed there would not be another. But that depended entirely on who he was now, and how often he could keep himself in check. Surely he knew better by now.


End file.
